Word: colorlessness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Indian officials began their investigations, details started to emerge about what went wrong at the plant. Methyl isocyanate, a colorless chemical compound that behaves in humans and animals like a potent form of tear gas (see box), is used by Union Carbide as an ingredient in producing relatively toxic pesticides known as Sevin and Temik. At the Bhopal facility it was stored in three double-walled, stainless steel tanks, buried mostly underground to limit leakage in the event of an accident and to help shield them from air temperatures that could soar to 120° F in summer. Refrigerated to keep...
...care who was watching us watching," remarks Alfred Kinsey; yet, they are careful, instinctively, to avoid revealing anything about themselves. The housemother wistfully recollects an accidental and inconclusive encounter with Ezra pound years ago-an evening spent listening to his soliloquizing, declaiming to the air forgetful of her colorless presence. Surrounded by irrefutable evidence of the futility of her existence, she tries to imbue this did not have by keeping it a carefully guarded secret...
...more worrisome, the party's continuing inability to appeal to the Sephardic Jewish immigrants from North Africa. Labor's failure to do better was all the more glaring because Peres' opponent was not, as in 1977 and 1981, the impassioned Menachem Begin but the untried and colorless Shamir. The outcome confirmed that the Sephardim, who now constitute a majority of Israel's population, have become a potent political force. Many of them hold a grudge against Labor for supposedly neglecting their needs during the 1950s and 1960s...
From the top of the dike the plain looked endless, colorless, with a few bare trees, a row of crooked telegraph poles, and half a dozen or so huts marking the view of the terrain but failing to interrupt its flatness and lack of color. The sound of a shepherd's reed in the distance made his small flock of sheep and goats visible. The goats separated themselves from the sheep seemingly by following the sound of their own bells. But there wasn't even a small patch of green, and what the animals fed on couldn't be anything...
...tousle-haired politician from Rotterdam has not always commanded such high expectations. A former Minister of Economics and millionaire businessman. Lubbers earned a reputation in his early years in politics as a colorless, woolly-mouthed party functionary. But when Prime Minister Andreas van Agt resigned in the fall of 1982 for health reasons, he surprised many by naming Lubbers his successor. The new leader inherited a collapsing economy. Recession-pinched tax revenues were being drained by the most bountiful social welfare system south of Sweden, dispensing such goodies as 80%-of-salary unemployment benefits and $250 monthly stipends for school...